In April or May they’re going to lace dead mice with painkillers, attach them to little parachutes, drop them from helicopters and hope that they get snagged in the jungle foliage. Then, if all goes well, the snakes—which, as their name implies, hang out in trees—will eat the mice and die from ingesting the painkillers’ active ingredients.

I think it’s the tiny parachutes that really make this story. I really do.

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Now I am sad, for I was ego-scanning for my Lime Pie recipe over there.

The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive or inappropriate. Viewer discretion is advised.

Private Snafu was a character in WWII training films. Here is Spies:

Script by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, voice characterizations by Mel Blanc, music by Carl Stalling, directed by Chuck Jones, racism, sexism, and xenophobia by American Popular Culture c. 1943.

This is one of the reasons that I find it difficult to believe that the translator/clerk character in Saving Private Ryan didn’t know the term FUBAR. Private Fubar was a character in some of the Private Snafu cartoons, and everyone in the Army would have seen all of them. A lot.

This hasn’t happened since the fifteenth century (and Dante put that guy into the Inferno as “he who made the great refusal” for doing it). [UPDATE/CORRECTION: The fifteenth century was the last time a Pope resigned. Dante’s guy was in the thirteenth century.]

To say this is a surprise is rather an understatement.

Rather than look for nefarious reasons, I think that he got the Word from the Bird: “Popes serve at the pleasure of God Almighty. God is not pleased.”

“Striking me dead wasn’t an option?”

“Yeah, it’s traditional, but We like to shake things up every now and then.”

Or, perhaps, he wants to keep on writing about theology and doesn’t want his personal opinions to be misinterpreted as the Official Catholic Position (no matter how many times he might say, “See that chair? I’m not sitting in it.”) Recall when his last book about Christmas came out and it was all The Pope Doesn’t Believe in Christmas! even though he was mostly saying that traditional Christmas carols are mostly of recent origin.

Well, we’ll see. Looks like Cardinals all over the world are making plane reservations for the first of March.

My beloved younger daughter, while waiting to hear back from grad schools, has been working retail. And recently she won a stuffed dog at work for knowing (during a training session) what a short-change swindle was. So, in hopes that you too will be able to win a stuffed dog, here is the Short Change Con. This one has been going on for a while (here it is in 1906) and there’s no reason to think it’ll stop any time soon.

Way back in The underlying forms of fraud a decade ago, Miss Teresa listed 2. Using high-pressure tactics to confuse or intimidate the victim but commented The list is a work in progress. I’m not altogether sure #2 belongs on it, though I’m not sure why or why not…. Well, it is, and Short Change is a perhaps the purest example of it, purer even than a used-car salesman or PublishAmerica’s versions of High Pressure Confusion Scamming.

You’ll start with a $10 bill, a $5 bill, and 15 $1 bills.
Buy something for under $5.
Pay with a $10 bill.
As your change of up to $5 is being retrieved, ask for another $10 bill for ten $1 bills you’re pulling out of your wallet.
Leave your original $5 change out, but pick up the $10 bill while you hand over only nine $1 bills.
Have them check the count as you go through your wallet, putting away the $10 bill and pulling out more singles.
They will count nine $1 bills, so you add 1 more $1 bill and throw on another five $1 bills and a $5 bill and ask for a $20 bill. Cashiers always like to make smaller change for their drawer.
They put the fifteen $1 bills and one $5 bill away and give you a $20 in return.
You just made $10.

While, in general, reading comments on YouTube videos is a waste of time, in this case the comments are about equal “That was a fake, they were both actors, that’ll never work in the real world” and “OMG that just happened to me today!” In actual fact, this scam is performed successfully somewhere in America once every nine seconds. A scammer can make $40 an hour just by walking up one side of the street and down the other (or from shop to shop in a mall) running this scam; all it has to do is hit once every fifteen minutes. If it doesn’t work, move on to the next place. If someone’s wise to it, what’s there for anyone to prove? You were just confused and made a mistake. Is that a crime now?

It’s a wonderful combination of high pressure and confusion, and no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is a con. A cheat. A swindle. Totally belongs on the list.

Entertaining until you get bitten by one, that is. No one is so street-smart, so cynical, and so canny that the right pitch on the right day by the right person won’t take them. These cons got to be classics by working reliably all day every day. See, for example, this hidden-camera view of the Pigeon Drop being run on a random citizen.

Which brings us around to somewhat similar con, in that the con artist gets change for an overpayment. We’ve mentioned this before: Scams from the Mailbag. There it was the Secret Shopper swindle. You get a spam email offering to make you a Secret Shopper. They’ll send you a check for $3,000. You deposit it in your account, take $200 to make a purchase at a local store (you get to keep what you buy!), get another $100 for your pay, and you send back the change by Western Union to some address. Piece of cake, right? Except two weeks later, when it turns out that the check was forged, you’re on the hook for the entire amount, plus a fee for depositing a bad check. You’ve already sent off $2,700 and change. Which you’ll never see again.

While the short change con relies on people being distracted and trying to be helpful (and cashiers are paid to try to be helpful), the counterfeit check scams rely on people trying to be helpful and honest. (You can, indeed, cheat an honest man.) Here’s the scam in the form of someone who wants to rent a property (or a room, or an apartment) who sends a check for more than the deposit/first month’s rent/whatever and asks the landlord to send back the change.

Which gets us to the current variant. A nice young lady is looking for a job as a babysitter/nanny/whatever, and advertises. In comes a letter, with picture of a cute kid, asking a lot of questions (e.g. “Are you CPR and first aid certified?”). You reply to the letter, having put no small amount of time/effort into answering the questions (thus getting invested in the deal, along with the promised $900/week). Hurrah! You’re hired!

You get a check from some third party, for your first month’s pay, plus a couple of thousand dollars that you weren’t expecting. Now … oh noes! You get a panicky phone call from someone claiming to be the lady who just hired you. She’s in England, having gone there with the Cute Kid to attend her mother’s funeral, and her banker/accountant/lawyer/agent has sent you your pay plus the price of her plane ticket home! She’ll be stranded! Could you be a dear, pop down to the bank, take the overage and wire it to her? Thanks! You’re a peach!

Again, the high pressure.

Then, a week later, the bank tells you that the check didn’t clear, and you’re on the hook for the entire amount, as above.

Today is the one-hundred and fifty-second anniversary of Jeff Davis learning that he was president of the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis, a former US Senator from Mississippi, was at home trimming his rose bushes when he learned that he’d been selected by the Confederate States of America’s constitutional convention. Up until then the thing he was best known for was designing a hat for the cavalry (the Davis Hat, worn by both sides during the Civil War) while he was Secretary of War.

Jeff hadn’t sought the honor, though he had written to the Governor of Mississippi, “Judge what Mississippi requires of me and place me accordingly.” My guess is that he was hoping to be appointed a general in the Mississippi militia. Davis’s wife, Varina, said later, “Reading that telegram he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes he told me like a man might speak of a sentence of death.”

He was an odd choice for Confederate president given that he had spent most of his Senatorial career arguing against secession. He was, however, a plantation owner and slave holder, which made him a logical choice.

Davis himself had no confidence in his ability to carry out the duties of the office. And he saw clearly the difficulties that lay ahead. “Upon my weary heart was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers, but beyond them I saw troubles innumerable. We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by powerful opposition but I do not despond and will not shrink from the task before me.”

He was right about being without machinery and means: What kind of a country starts a war when it doesn’t own a single cannon factory? His wisest move might have been to make his first act in office to sue for peace while begging for readmission to the Union.

Some years ago I recall (but cannot now find on the Google-indexed web), a cereal company had a US Presidents word-search puzzle printed on the back of the box. And, seemingly by chance, the name “Davis” appeared in the puzzle (though not on the official list of answers). While looking for documentation on that event I did discover that you can get a picture jigsaw puzzle of Jeff Davis dancing on an American flag.

While Davis was charged with treason he was never tried. He was stripped of US citizenship and ability to run for public office, though it was eventually returned to him by congress in 1978. A pity he didn’t run in ‘80; he was a Democrat and might have beaten Reagan.

It is not true that Jeff attempted to avoid capture by Union troops by dressing in women’s clothing. He was wearing Varina’s shawl because it was cold.

My personal connection: My co-author, Doyle, is related (on the Taylor side of the family) to Jeff Davis’s first wife, Sarah.

We’ve talked about various heat-and-cold injuries to the body: Cold Blows the Wind Today and Heat Stress. Now it’s time to talk about something a bit more acute and a bit less systemic: Traumatic burns.

Now it’s time to get into the guts (so to speak) of Burns. Burns are some of the most frightening injuries. They are some of the most painful injuries. And, they can be life-threatening.

Sorry, folks, no pictures. Y’all can find ‘em on your own.

While burn injuries are classified as trauma, they have some significant differences from most other kinds of trauma. Normally, after (say) blunt trauma (e.g. falling off a roof) the body responds by constricting blood vessels, increasing heart rate, forming clots, shifting fluid to the area to allow white cells to access the injury, and similar good stuff. By contrast, with a major burn, the body’s defense mechanisms paradoxically cause it to shut down, go into shock, and die. Vasoconstriction and clotting can increase the size and severity of the burn while so much fluid may shift that it will throw the body into hypovolemic shock. Treatment of burns, prehospital, focuses on stopping or reversing those processes.

First: Stay safe. You can’t help a patient if you become a patient yourself. Downed power lines stay dangerous until someone wearing a white hard hat says they’re safe.

Second: Stop the burning process. If someone is on fire, put them out.

While the flames (and the thermal burns they produce) are the dramatic part of fire, the most dangerous part of a fire is the smoke. A very small amount of smoke inhalation can be fatal. Smoke, in addition to the particulates, can carry carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur dioxide, and other chemical goodies. Usually, unless you’re looking at a steam burn, you won’t see a lot of actual thermal injury inside the lungs. Dry air doesn’t carry a lot of heat. But those particulates and gasses can produce chemical burns to the lungs even if they aren’t directly poisonous, producing chemical pneumonia and … this is bad.

The amount of smoke inhaled is the number one predictor of mortality in burn injuries, way ahead of the age of the patient or the surface area of the burn. Continue to be suspicious with someone who has escaped from a fire. Sometimes the symptoms of smoke inhalation don’t appear for hours or days.

The importance of smoke became obvious after the Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston in 1942. Seemingly uninjured people who had escaped the fire and come to the hospitals looking for friends were falling down and dying in the waiting rooms. The presence of plastics was what had changed: Some of plastics’ byproducts of combustion are purely nasty.

While burns are not just injuries of the skin, that’s where we’re going to start as we look at this kind of injury. Often the first signs of burn injury appear on the skin.

Your typical adult has somewhere around 1.5 to 2 square meters of skin, divided into two layers: The epidermis on top, and the dermis below that. Below the dermis come the subcutaneous layers. The skin of males is typically thicker than the skin of females. The skins of children (<5) and elderly (>65) are typically thinner than adults. The skin is the largest organ in the body. It has three primary functions: Infection control, heat regulation, and water control. Burn injuries compromise all three of these functions.

Sometimes you hear burns classified as superficial, partial thickness, and full thickness. The “thickness” referred to is the thickness of the skin. I’m going to use another system of nomenclature: First degree, second degree, third degree, and fourth degree.

Your body contains an awful lot of protein. Proteins are complex molecules that easily denature with heat. When the body is burned, the central, most highly damaged, part of the burn is called the zone of coagulation. Which is exactly what it sounds like: The tissues have been hard boiled. The proteins have coagulated. The cells there are dead; they will not regenerate. Another cheerful name for this zone is the “zone of necrosis.”

The area surrounding the zone of coagulation is the zone of stasis. The cells there aren’t dead, but they are injured. Blood isn’t flowing to them; nutrients aren’t getting to them; oxygen isn’t getting to them. Without oxygen and nutrients those cells will die, and the zone of necrosis will expand.

Around the zone of stasis is the zone of hyperemia. Cells in this area are damaged, but not too badly, and are getting increased blood flow; the increased blood flow is part of the body’s normal reaction to any injury. The blood vessels get “leaky” to allow fluid to enter the intercellular space (between the cells) which allows white blood cells to access all parts of the injury. This causes swelling (edema) as the area puffs up with water.

It’s deucedly difficult to tell how deep a burn is immediately after the injury using a Mark One Eyeball. A burn that appears superficial may actually be deep, and that fact may not be apparent for up to 48 hours after the injury (when the top layers of the skin slough off). That being said, let’s talk about burn depths.

First degree burns. These only involved the epidermis (from epi - above; dermis - skin). These are the ones that are also called “superficial.” The epidermis varies in thickness from 1/20 of a millimeter on the eyelids to 1 millimeter on the soles of the feet. The signs are redness, the symptoms are pain. Usually they heal by themselves within a week without scarring. Large area superficial burns risk dehydration and the pain may be intense. The classic first degree burn is sunburn. Drink a lot of water and avoid re-injuring the area before it’s healed.

Second degree burns. These are also called “partial thickness burns” because they go part-way through the dermis. The most obvious feature of second degree burns are surface blisters or bare patches with a wet, glistening appearance. Exactly how severe a second degree burn is depends on how deep it is and how it’s cared for. A comparatively shallow second degree burn, with circulation rapidly returned to the zone of stasis, can heal on its own with normal wound care in two to three weeks. A deeper second degree burn, or where the zone of stasis is allowed to progress to necrosis, may require surgical treatment. An improperly treated second degree burn can convert into a third degree burn. Which you’re looking at is hard to determine on-scene. Second degree burns are also quite painful. Even air moving across the skin may be unbearable. (This is because the epidermis may be gone so that the nerve endings are directly exposed to the environment.)

Third degree burns. Sometimes called “full thickness” burns. They go all the way through the dermis. These burns generally have a thick, dry, leathery, white appearance (regardless of the race or skin color of the patient). The skin may appear charred. Blood vessels may be obviously congealed. These burns require surgical care and rehabilitation in specialty centers.

While third degree burns are classically painless (since the nerves are completely destroyed), they are generally surrounded by areas of second and first degree burns which are exquisitely painful.

Fourth degree burns are those that penetrate the skin entirely, with damage to the underlying fat, muscle, bone, or organs.

Let’s talk about blisters for a minute. They occur when the epidermis separates from the dermis and the space beneath the epidermis fills with fluid leaking from the damaged tissues below. This fluid contains proteins; it therefore continues to draw water into itself by osmotic pressure. Thus, blisters tend to grow, putting pressure on the wound beneath and increasing pain. Blisters do not actually act as a barrier to infection since they are not normal skin. But the need to drain and debride them is handled in a burn center, not in the field. If/when a blister opens, topical antiseptics are used to help prevent infection. Secondary infections after burns can be life-threatening.

Burns produce a massive fluid shift inside the body, from the blood vessels to the intracelluar space. Even more fluid is lost through evaporation. This produces hypovolemic shock. The treatment for this is massive amounts of intravenous fluid; according to the Parkland Formula (named after the hospital where it was devised), that’s 4mL of normal saline IV per kilogram of body weight per percent of surface area burned, with half of it delivered in the first eight hours after the time of injury and the rest over the next sixteen hours.

Please note that while massive fluid shifts are taking place, they take place over a period of hours. If the patient is showing signs of shock immediately or over a period of minutes, there’s more going on than just the burns: Look for broken bones, lacerations, and other trauma. Someone who fell down stairs or jumped out a second-floor window trying to escape a fire has those injuries too and you’ll have to deal with them; they may kill the patient before the burn has a chance to do it. Burns are dramatic and grotesque injuries. Don’t let them distract you from noticing that the patient is also having a heart attack, diabetic emergency, stroke, or other medical problem.

So what do we do, in the field, for burns?

First, as mentioned, stop the burning process. This does not mean “cool the burn.” The best way to stop the burning process is by flooding the area with large amounts of tepid water. Applying cold water or ice is contraindicated because that has the effect of making the blood vessels in the area constrict. Constricted blood vessels stop blood flow. But we’re trying to get blood to flow to the zone of stasis. Cold water or ice can convert the zone of stasis to the zone of necrosis and turn a shallow second degree burn into a deep second degree burn, or a second degree burn into a third degree burn. Yes, ice will numb the pain. But you’d be far better off using an oral painkiller for that, or just telling the patient to hang in there and gut it out.

In the course of stopping the burning process remove all jewelery and clothing from the patient. Those items retain heat, or trap chemicals, or constrict the body when the obligate edema occurs. All bad things.

Protect the area with dry, sterile (if you have ‘em) non-adherent (if you have ‘em) dressings. Wrap the patient in a clean dry sheet. You want to limit airflow over the wound. If you have a burned hand, put dressings between the fingers. Don’t put on creams or lotions — they may retain heat, or they may make it difficult for the nice folks at the burn center to assess the injury, and may make it impossible for them to use certain treatments (e.g. tissue-engineered products). (And it’s going to hurt like a dog when they scrape the goo off, too.)

As in any injury, maintain the patient’s airway, breathing, and circulation. While you’re stripping off all his/her clothing, pay attention to other injuries that may be revealed. One thing that you can do: Check every pulse point that you know. Take your Sharpie Pen and mark the ones that have pulses. Later on, swelling may make those pulses vanish, but the nice doctors will thank you for finding them.

Burn patients are unable to maintain their own body temperature. The skin controls temperature; they’ve lost their skin. After you’ve wrapped them in that clean, dry sheet, wrap them in a couple of blankets. Get them somewhere warm. Turn up the heat. If you aren’t uncomfortable it isn’t warm enough.

Now some special kinds of burns:

1) Electrical burns. Typically the injury appears less severe than it really is, since the only obvious surface burns are at the points of contact, but the damage is done internally as the electricity goes from the source to ground. Along with the destruction of tissue in general there’s a special (and this is in common with crush injuries); when muscle is injured it releases potassium, with can cause fatal heart arrhythmias, and it releases myoglobin, which causes kidney damage. Fractures due to muscle contraction are also a real possibility. In an electrical burn assume that the patient’s back or neck is broken.

2) Circumferential burns. That is, they go all the way around either a limb or the chest. On a limb, a circumferential burn can act like a tourniquet and stop blood flow to the outer portions of the limb, resulting in tissue death. Around the chest, a circumferential burn can make it difficult or impossible for the patient to expand the chest and breathe. This is bad.

3) Smoke inhalation. I’ve mentioned this twice already, but it really is that important. Burns to the face or mouth, or a patient who’s spitting up black sooty phlegm, should make you think of smoke inhalation. But just because you don’t see those signs doesn’t mean the patient didn’t get a lethal lungful. Any time you have combustion you have carbon monoxide. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, lightheadedness, and vague flu-like symptoms. Or, unconsciousness and death. The primary treatment is to get the patient away from the source of carbon monoxide. The half-life of carbon monoxide in the body when breathing normal air is 250 minutes. When breathing 100% oxygen, the half-life of carbon monoxide is forty to sixty minutes. So, oxygen if you have it. Cyanide — the treatment for cyanide is rapid transport to an emergency room that has the antidote available. Particulates: The treatment is even more IV fluid, because the surface area of the burn is lots bigger than it looks. Sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen chloride — all present in smoke — can create damage in the lungs that doesn’t become apparent for days after the exposure. The amount, the duration of the exposure… don’t assume you’re out of the woods just because the patient seems to be fine the next day. Anyone who’s been in or near a fire needs to be observed for a considerable time.

4) Chemical burns. Treat them like thermal burns, using large amounts of tepid water to stop the burning process. By “large” I do not mean “a liter or two” or even “a gallon or two.” I mean throw-them-in-the-shower or turn-a-garden-hose-on-them for twenty minutes. (Don’t attempt to neutralize acids or bases; the chemical reaction between the two may create heat, producing further injury, and anything strong enough to neutralize a strong acid or base is itself hazardous.) Remember, the water that you’re using to flush the injury is itself contaminated and may be hazardous to you. Be careful. Protect yourself first.

When you’re calling the hospital to tell them that you have a burn patient, the two things they want to know are a) the patient’s weight, and b) the percent of the body surface area that’s burned. One way of estimating body area is the Rule of Nines. (Another way is by estimating how many times the patient’s palm would cover the burn; the palm of the hand is about 1% of the patient’s skin surface.)

Bottom line: All burns are serious, regardless of their size. There is no such thing as a “minor” burn. Unlike other forms of trauma the body has few-to-no natural defense mechanisms. The defense mechanisms that it does have tend to worsen the injury. On the plus side, burns are seldom rapidly fatal. You have time to get the patient to a burn center.

The leading cause of death in burn patients is smoke inhalation. Even in the absence of surface burns any patient with smoke inhalation should be taken to the hospital, and may well be transported to a specialty burn center after evaluation.

A patient with burns means that the situation is dangerous. Be careful. Do not become a victim yourself.

I want to highlight and poke at something that Jacque said in the last DF thread:

…having spent one’s formative years surviving and protecting that embryo—and one finally Gets Out, and all of a sudden it’s “Now what?” Surviving is a fundamentally different skill-set from Thriving.

This community talks a lot about how the expectations that the children of dysfunctional families have turn out to be wrong in the outside world. Something goes wrong and there is not inevitably an immediate explosion of fury and blame. Arguments are often a tool for resolving differences, not deepening them. Instead of defensiveness and denial, wrongdoing is usually followed by apologies and restitution. Relationships generally run on joy and generosity rather than fear and obligation. Coming from a dysfunctional background, it must be like walking into a mirror universe.

(The above paragraph has been updated in bold with Lee @4’s suggestions. Thanks to her and Pvt_Prvt @2 for highlighting my over-generalizations, and I apologize to anyone whom they hurt or made feel uncomfortable.)

It’s inevitable that the skillsets of people who grew up amidst dysfunction will be similarly out of synch. The transition from the old to the new is only partly geography; the real challenge is moving out of the habits and reflexes that made it possible to survive an abusive situation. We often talk about this transformation in the negative: not doing this destructive thing, not listening to that tape. And all of that is hugely important.

But if thriving is a different thing than surviving, how does a survivor start? How does someone build a new, functional self on a shaky foundation? What are the tools, tricks and habits to acquire to not just exist in this new world, but blossom in it?

And can a person still in the old situation lay the foundations for those skills, tuck them away like linens in a hope chest for a better future?

This is part of the sequence of Dysfunctional Families discussions. We have a few special rules, specific to the needs and nature of the conversations we have here.

If you want to participate but don’t want your posts linked to your contributions to the rest of Making Light, feel free to choose a pseudonym. But please keep it consistent within these threads, because people do care. You can create a separate (view all by) history for your pseudonym by changing your email address. And if you blow it and cross identities, give me a shout and I’ll come along and tidy it up.

On a related note, please respect the people’s choice to use a pseudonym, unless they make it clear that they are willing to let the identities bleed over in people’s minds.

If you’re not from a dysfunctional background, be aware that your realities and base expectations are not the default in this conversation. In particular, please don’t do the “they’re the only family you have” thing. Black is white, up is down, and your addressee’s mother may very well be their nemesis.

Be even more careful, charitable, and gentle than you would elsewhere on Making Light. Try to avoid “hlepiness” (those comments which look helpful, but really aren’t). Apologize readily and sincerely if you tread on toes, even unintentionally. This kind of conversation only works because people have their defenses down.

Never underestimate the value of a good witness. If you want to be supportive but don’t have anything specific to say, people do value knowing that they are heard.

Previous posts (note that comments are closed on them to keep the conversation in one place):

Looks like the New England states, New York City, Long Island, and places south and west of there will get kinda clobbered this weekend. As in, starting Friday night. Up to two feet of snow; blizzard conditions, coastal flooding. We’re doing the storm-from-the-south meets storm-from-the-northwest thing again.

So, in preparation, here’s a list of Making Light posts that dealt with some of the issues we’re going to be seeing:

This storm looks like it’ll be backed by hurricane-force winds, so all the posts about hurricane preparedness stand: Hurricane Lantern.

During a snow event, a major killer is carbon monoxide. Snow blocks vents. Snow makes us keep the windows shut tight. And, when the power fails, sometimes snow makes us do silly things involving open flames or charcoal indoors. Check your carbon monoxide detector and recall that anything that has a flame is producing CO: Stop, Drop, and Roll.

So, stay safe, everyone. Don’t travel if you don’t have to. And remember: Weather disasters mean it’s time to make French Toast! (NOTE: While stocking up on bread, milk, and eggs, don’t forget the butter, bacon, and syrup. What kind of savages are you, anyway?)

Via James Nicoll, I read that MCA Hogarth, an author and artist whose work I was not previously familiar with — still aren’t, really, since it’s five in the ay-em right now and I just want to write this up quick and get to bed — seems to do a lot of self-publishing, and recently discovered that one of her books, Spots the Space Marine has been blocked from sale on Amazon, after a claim of trademark infringement from Games Workshop.

Since 1987, GW has published a series of games (and ancillary merchandise) get in their “Warhammer 40,000” setting, full of spike-covered pseudo-elves and pseudo-orcs amd chainswords and the like, all set in space (instead of on a planet like their original Warhammer setting). GW has apparently decided that, since they’ve got space marines in their setting, they own the very concept of space marines.

Hogarth has talked to several lawyers, and they’re all willing to take the case, but not pro bono. The legal costs “start at $2000 and climb into the five-figure realm”, which is more than she stands to make off the book if she does get to sell it. I figure Hogarth might be able to use some added attention.

We still use a number of my husband’s fast/cheap/good recipes, if you’re interested. Examples: Ethiopian Lentil Bowl, which basically involves equal parts red lentils and garlic, plus some canned tomatoes and lemon juice. Or what we call “Hyrulean Beans” (he was playing a lot of Legend of Zelda when he invented this one) which is stewed refried beans, tomatoes, and fried onions with a few common herbs/spices, with frozen corn thrown in toward the end. In both cases, serve with rice for a complete protein, and in both cases they make LOADS and freeze well.

If you want detailed recipes for these or others, perhaps one of the mods could put us in touch?

Well, to start: My beloved bride (and long-time co-author), Debra Doyle, hath (like Geoffrey Chaucer) a blog, in which she from time to time puts recipes. Since what we eat here is, pretty much all of it, fast, easy, cheap, and good, herewith is a sample, to start the pot heating (as it were):

The looming deadline looms ever nearer, and tonight’s dinner is therefore dazzling in its simplicity: Crockpot Kielbasa and Cabbage.

For which you need only a crockpot, a head of cabbage, and about one pound of kielbasa. You cut up the cabbage into small enough pieces that it’ll fit into your crockpot, you cut up the kielbasa into half-rounds, and you slow-cook them together on low until dinnertime. Some people put caraway seeds into the pot with the cabbage, but we’ve got at least one anti-caraway person in this household, so I don’t.

Former NYC mayor Ed Koch has died, on the very same day that a documentary about him opens. There’s something theatrically appropriate, something inherently Koch-like, about that.

Maybe it’s that he was mayor all through my teens and into my early twenties (1978–89), but he’s always seemed like the definitive mayor of New York City. He was somehow iconic. How iconic? Well, there was this: